(2010-01-15) Vail Resilient Suburbia

Jeff Vail has a series of posts on Resilient Suburbia (Suburb as Resilient Community?). No matter how energy-efficient cities may be (especially when compared to presently extant alternatives like suburbia), they are most fundamentally the manifestation of hierarchal structures engaged in peer-polity competition—a mode of human organization that, I believe, is at its core the root of humanity’s unsustainability (because it drives our demand for growth) and it is, itself, undesirable (because it emphasizes the mean at the expense of the median, marginalizing the vast majority of participants). I agree about the hierarchy issue, but I'm not convinced on the mean/median point. He's essentially saying that the poor do worse in cities, but I think the poor start out really poor and come to the city for opportunity.